Banyan Public

The Banyan Project aims to nourish the widest possible informed electorate and thus it aims to nourish journalism that appeals to people from all walks of life. So Banyan’s distinctive approach to community journalism will focus coverage on the needs of America’s everyday citizens — the half of the population who are neither affluent nor poverty-stricken, the people we call the Banyan Public.

This huge public has beenabandoned by crumbling newspapers, which tend to focus on an audience heavy with professionals, executives and others who can afford to shop at upscale advertisers’ businesses. Members of the Banyan Public are likelier to be hourly wage earners or solo contractors and others who are self-employed, people who do much of their shopping at discounters that rarely advertise. They fall roughly within the third to seventh deciles of the household income distribution, with incomes in the $30,000-$75,000 range. Not many have much money to invest and most Americans without health insurance are in this group. They hunger for useful and trustworthy information that’s relevant to the particular life and citizenship decisions they face, but it grows ever more scarce despite the great need.

Clay Shirky, a respected voice in the future-of-journalism discourse, emphasizes the question of how future journalism will serve average people.

“People like me are never going to be ill served in an information rich environment,” Shirky said after an appearance at Yale University. The real question in a democracy, he said, is whether citizens will have access to accountability journalism — “journalism that keeps their town, their region, their state operating in relatively efficient, relatively responsive, and relatively non-corrupt ways.” He added, “What happens to the elite class of info-vores, although it gets a lot of obsessive attention, is never going to be a problem.”

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The Banyan Project is a nonprofit organization founded from the thinking of 31 senior journalists, academics, Web developers, sociologists and researchers, business and financial strategists, and advocates for strengthening democracy brought together by Tom Stites. Members of this Board of Advisors are listed below; click on names to see bios.